A blog about video games and not much else. Updates at intervals of time.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

On Homestuck, Part 1

Note: This was originally going to be one article, but I rambled on
even longer than usual and there was a lot of what could technically be
described as “research” involved. As a result, it’s been split into two parts.
The second half will go up on Friday. For those of you viewing from the
mystical portal of chronology known as the future, you’ll find that it’s already here.

...and also here. Future me didn’t warn me this would be a
three parter.

Two weeks ago, after
exactly 7 years of updates, a comic called Homestuck finally ended. I’m here
today to talk about it.

I rarely talk about
anything personal on this blog. I rarely talk about anything unrelated to video
games. I rarely talk about my opinions on wildly popular topics. Today I plan
on breaking all of these trends, in observance of my biggest unwritten rule: “I
write what I feel like.” However, this would be nothing without my second
biggest unwritten rule: “Don’t suck.” Inspiring wording on that one. Point is,
even though this article is outside my usual wheelhouse, I’ll endeavor to keep
the quality similar, like that of a wheelbungalow or at least a wheelshanty.

I’m also aware that
Homestuck has something of a...baggage behind it. This immensely popular
internet sensation brought in millions of fans from every corner of the digital
realm. Based on the content of the piece and the culture generally seen around
it, it’s a safe bet that most of them were teenagers or the recently teenaged.
Combined with the fact that Homestuck itself is very strange and heavily
memetic, and it’s no surprise it frustrated those outside its fandom. Hell,
sometimes it frustrated those inside it. So if you don’t like Homestuck, I have
good news for you! The final seal on the ancient wizard’s curse I used to force
you to read all my blog posts has dissipated. You don’t have to read this. I
won’t take offense. In fact, I’m literally unable to take offense, as my
readership is so small ambient google noise is indistinguishable from a dip in
views.

Pictured: Traffic
after a cat rolls on a keyboard and accidentally visits Genericide.

Those who haven’t leapt
over their computer chair and fled the room, foolishly forgetting they can just
close the browser tab, fall into two categories. The first are those who have
read Homestuck, or at least some portion of it. You’re here to fill the void
after its recent ending, to see an alternate viewpoint on it, or something similar.
The rest of you can’t tell a Sburb from a Skaia, yet you still remain for some
reason. Maybe you’re curious about what all the fuss was about now that the
rabid fandom has faded. Maybe you’re just really bored. Maybe you hang onto
every piece of prose I produce with rapt attention, stroking your computer
screen and secretly fantasizing about romancing and cannibalizing me behind a
7/11. Whatever floats your boat.

This article will be
written with the newcomers in mind. There will no spoilers on anything
specific, which is fine since I don’t have much to say on specifics anyways.
Instead, I’ll be focusing on my personal feelings towards Homestuck and the
impact it left on me. Because make no mistake, Homestuck had an impact on me.
It’d be hard to read a work of over 8,000 pages and 800,000 words and not be
impacted. But it goes beyond that. This one webcomic was a huge part of my
life, and influenced me in all sorts of ways. Homestuck has affected me more
than almost any not-a-video-game I’ve ever consumed.

We’ll start with a simple
question: Why?

Let Me Tell You about
Homestuck

Years in the past (but
not many), a man named Andrew Hussie had a fun little experiment on an internet
forum. He wrote and drew a comic called Jailbreak,
but the contents of each update were determined by user suggestions on the
forum. It was a goofy jaunt parodying text-based adventure games, and though
extremely different from his later works you can still see bits of his humor
shine through, such as a fondness for screwing with the reader and
self-referential running gags. After Jailbreak trailed off, Hussie started a
new interactive story called Bardquest on his freshly minted website MS Paint Adventures. Beyond the phrase
“groincobbler”, it was mediocre and left hanging even sooner than its
predecessor. But as they say, third time’s the charm. Enter Problem Sleuth.

Over the one-year running
time of Problem Sleuth, Andrew Hussie pumped out an impressive 1,700 pages of
updates. What started as a simple quest for a private eye to escape his room
became a multi-dimensional quest of massive proportions. It parodied all sorts
of tropes, especially game related ones, and remains an enjoyable read to this
day. If you’re interested in something a bit less massive than Homestuck or
with less focus on drama and character dialogue, I can definitely recommend it.
But this isn’t a post titled “On Problem Sleuth” so I’ll leave you to
investigate it on your own. It’s high time we got to the meat of things:

What is Homestuck?

And why does it
seemingly have so little to do with homes?

Homestuck is a webcomic,
but with vast walls of dialogue, animated gifs, and occasional full-on
animations or interactive portions accompanied by music. The spoiler-free plot
(beyond early reveals that are necessary to spoil to give you any idea of what
happens) is as follows: Four teenaged internet
friends play a video game that turns out to magically affect reality and
involve them in a massive war between the forces of good and evil. That’s
it. As you might expect of an 8000 page epic, there’s more to it than that. But
complex though it may eventually get, the base premise is actually remarkably
simple. So really, this side steps the more interesting question:

Why is Homestuck good?

The Not-So-Secret
Recipe

Homestuck Worked Fast – I’ve yet to see anything that updated as
quickly and consistently as Homestuck, let alone for so long. The quick and
clean artstyle typically relied on basic shapes and edited photographs, and its
big animations were heavily supported by other artists and musicians of the
rapidly growing fandom. As a result, Andrew Hussie didn’t have a set update
schedule. Rather than update the comic on certain days, he updated it every day. Multiple times a day. For years.

It is hard to explain
just how irregularly, ridiculously high
this rate of output is. It wasn’t just a few tiny panels a day, either. Updates
were frequently animated gifs, series of images, or series of animated gifs.
The text output also varied wildly. Text was given in narration or dialogue
shown below the image rather than in word bubbles, so it could be as lengthy as
it wanted. And sometimes, for better or worse, it was really lengthy.

On top of this were
occasional big animations or interactive segments accompanied by music. There
are 163 pages in the 8000 post run with sound. Though not huge proportionally,
these were often several minute affairs with a lot going on in them, and their
introduction? Completely seamless! For the first few years of the comic,
there’d be no delay for Hussie to work on an animation. Through assistance,
forward planning and willpower, he somehow managed to create multiple daily
updates and then once a month or so throw in big animations without missing so
much as a day. If Homestuck got its claws into you, then it would always be
there with new content, every day.

Homestuck Was Modern and Memetic – When you put aside all the
world-hopping, large-scale conflict, Homestuck is mostly just teenagers having
amusing conversations. The result, if I could pull up my suspenders and wave my
cane for a moment, “appealed to the youth of today”. I should know, since I’m
one of the youths in question. Homestuck is technically a comic, but it’s a
comic that makes no effort whatsoever to imitate print comics, and couldn’t if
it tried. It features wildly varying walls of text, a constant flow of tiny
animations, temporarily branching story paths, interactive portions, music, and
a big nebulous network of vaguely canon fanworks. None
of this would be possible outside of the internet. The writing is also very
casual and modern, such that conversation closely resembles how people talk
online.

I also mentioned that
Hussie’s earlier work was self-referential. Much like everything else,
Homestuck cranked this attribute up to eleven. You have an army of running gags
that pop up over and over and constant visual references to earlier scenes.
There are enough brick jokes (WARNING: TV Tropes link) to produce a city’s
worth of building material. I’m surprised anyone can see three feet ahead of
them through all the foreshadowing. And just when you think you’ve got all the
references figured out, they’ll invert what you expect, or twist it, or
viciously lampshade it, or double reverse invert twist it with a hint of lemon,
because this comic has a complex and confusing relationship to irony.

Unrelated, but have I
mentioned it’s really hard to find relevant images without spoiling anything in
7 years of updates?

The focus on internal
references rather than external, combined with the impressive variety of ways
they’re presented, keeps things fairly funny the whole way through. Though
self-contained running gags keep popping up, they cycle through at a rate that
nothing ever becomes as tired as the popular memes of the internet at large. Of
course, as much as this is a recipe for hilarity, it’s also a recipe for the
irritating fanbase that Homestuck accumulated. The internet quickly grew sick
of these seas of rabid fans constantly spewing opaque references and, well,
doing what teenage fans on the internet do with everything. I can totally
sympathize with outsiders finding this frustrating, but I maintain that the style
of writing that caused all these annoying memes is funny within the work
itself.

Homestuck Aspired to More Than Just Humor – There are some amusing
moments in Jailbreak and Bardquest. Problem Sleuth was a satisfying epic of
ridiculous nonsense coming together for some fantastic humor. But Homestuck
added two important things to those previous works that really changed its
dynamic. I’m not talking about the animations or the improved art style, nice
though those are. I’m not talking about the music, though I’ll come back to
that awesome subject later. The two most important things Homestuck added were dialogue and drama.

No one spoke in previous
adventures. Hussie would narrate people discussing without quoting their words
directly, and these exchanges tended to be brief. Whereas these were tiny
moments that conveyed only hints of personality, Homestuck is almost nothing but long, in-depth conversations between
the various characters. Said characters were orders of magnitude more engaging
than the fun-but-flat avatars explored in the previous adventures. This new
investment in characters was then used for a much more dramatic narrative.

This was about as
close as Problem Sleuth got to interpersonal drama.

A series becoming more
dramatic as time goes on is nothing new. It’s a well-documented phenomenon (WARNING: Yup, another one) which can sometimes lead to great new drama but sometimes leads to a mess. The
interesting thing about Homestuck is that it never stopped being silly and
funny. I’m not just talking about in the general sense, where sometimes the
drama eases off and throws comedy a bone. Homestuck continues to be goofy and
weird right smack-dab in the middle of the drama. Relationships come and go,
stakes climb ever higher, and a large number of people die or are seriously
injured. Yet through all of that things remain silly, often even the horrific
villains doing the murdering. It’s a fairly bizarre balance of humor and
seriousness, and I’m still not sure of what to think of it in certain spots. But
it does keep the tone from dipping too low and when the contrast works it’s a
comedy brick to the head.

Uh, a brick to the head
in a good way, which exists for the purpose of this metaphor. Imagine that you
have some type of bizarre disease which makes concussions feel awesome. And,
er, your gaping head wound bleeds like, chocolate sauce? Damn, I am not making this sound any better, am I?
Look, it’s cool sometimes, okay? And, perhaps most important of all, it’s
unique.

Homestuck Had Something For Everyone – Homestuck is a work of
fiction not quite like any ever seen before. Andrew Hussie has a very
distinctive writing style and the style it’s presented is unusual. But despite
being a defined, singular work all the way through, it’s like a tentacle
monster with no concept of personal space: It gets its hands on everything. It parodies, references or
discusses just about every artistic medium and personality type that can be
found on the internet. Whether you like video games, tabletop games, webcomics,
anime, bad movies, relationship drama, narrative deconstructions, superhero
stories, pop culture jokes, psuedo-philosophical ramblings, snausages, or epic
galaxy wide conflicts? It’s all there. We can haggle on how significantly each
piece is involved in the narrative, but Homestuck covers a hell of a lot of
ground in terms of subject matter.

This is also reflected in
the characters themselves. Most characters in Homestuck are first introduced as
vivid stereotypes of certain personality types or subcultures of people you can
find on the internet. I’ve said before that starting from stereotypes is a good
way to write characters, and Homestuck is a prime example. Some characters get
more spotlight than others, develop as people and go through believable arcs.
Some less so. But being written this way means that, even if plenty of characters
don’t turn out to be fascinating, multi-faceted or complex, they’re all memorable. Despite Homestuck containing
a ridiculously enormous cast, I can instantly recall the basic gist of everyone
involved.

For example, I remember
that [YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTER] is terrible and stupid in every way and how
could anyone ever like them you must be a huge tool.

This, combined with the
previous points, meant that Homestuck pulled a number of very different people
into the fandom who normally wouldn’t have interacted with one another.
Spring-boarding off of this, I think it’s about time I talked about what
Homestuck meant to me specifically.

Personal Experiences

I was in High School when
Homestuck first came out. I have no idea how I first came across MS Paint
Adventures, but somehow I found it before any of my friends. I read though
Problem Sleuth and loved it, jumping straight into Homestuck while it was still
just several months in. I found that a friend I’d already made that year had
also stumbled upon the comics, and we started discussing them. Within a year or
two I’d been introduced, from chain reactions of friendship mostly originating
form that single person, to a group that to this day contains some of the best
friends I’ve ever made. Homestuck was not the reason for these friendships, but
it cropped up around the same time and quite a number of the people I knew read
it. There’s a power to that nostalgia.

Indeed, when it came to
my larger circle of acquaintances, Homestuck was the most common thing among
them. My closest friends had plenty of mutual interests, and not all of them
read the comic. Yet often times I’d be introduced to some friend-of-a-friend
and it would be the only topic we could instantly discuss. Its popularity and
appeal drew in a really diverse crowd of people, all of whom were various
levels of obsessed. Some were casual readers who liked talking about their favorite
characters now and then. Some were way into the art and fan communities. Some
were self-proclaimed theorymancers who pored over details, constantly combing
through old pages to separate the countless innocuous jokes and references from
foreshadowing and hidden meaning.

You can feel the
deeply concealed plot developments in every page.

One year, a group of
these people and I were heading to a gaming convention and decided to cosplay
as Homestuck characters. Cosplay has never really been my thing, and I’m not
much for physical arts and crafts. However, I did own the t-shirt of one of the characters. And thus, when a
friend tossed me a pair of aviators worn by said character, my extremely
intricate ensemble was complete. I didn’t even share the same facial hair or
color of the character, but I wasn’t about to let things like putting in effort
stop me. Those shades are still sitting at the bottom of a nearby drawer to
this day, ready for the next time destiny demands I perform a quarter-assed
metamorphosis into a fictional cool-dude fast approaching half my age.

Homestuck does have
faults, which I’d say are mainly related to struggling under its own weight as
time went on. Once upon a time I loved it, now I merely like it. Back in the
day it was a massive juggernaut of cultural influence, now it’s merely a cool
thing that happened. Yet no matter what opinion of it I hold in the present,
Homestuck was significant. So much so
that it’s difficult to encapsulate in just one blog article.

...so I won’t try! Psyche!

...

...oh wait, if I make
this multi-part I’ll have to note that in the title. Curses! Foiled by my
scrupulous tendency of accurately representing article headers! I retract my
previous psyche, counteracting it with an un-psyche. Which I guess would just
be a really predictable outcome. Maybe I helpfully remind you that the sky is still
blue? If any of you require some sort of psyche counseling or reparations,
please let me know.

Join me next time for
music, fan adventures, and some manner of conclusion.